The Watchtower

revised my impression from funeral parlor to hospital ER. Liquid was dripping from the bladder, down through the reed, and into a metal shunt fitted into the crook of the man’s arm. Amazed, I looked at the face of the man on the table—and was even more amazed to find Will’s face.
    “It’s not Will, you understand,” Madame La Pieuvre whispered as she came up beside me. “It’s Marduk.”
    “I know … only when I saw him last, he had only partly taken on Will’s features. You could still see the monster below the skin, but now…”
    “He looks like an angel. This is why Dee and Ruggieri are draining their victims. If Marduk fed directly from his victims, he’d take on their features, but feeding like this, he continues to look like Will.”
    “But why? Why do they want him to look like Will?”
    Madame La Pieuvre shrugged. “Why not choose a beautiful face for your monster? With this face he’ll be able to mingle with aristocracy and lure unsuspecting victims to their doom. He’s fooled you, hasn’t he?”
    I tore my eyes away from Will—from Marduk—looked into Madame La Pieuvre’s keen eyes, and I knew I’d been looking at the monster with love. “He looks so much like Will. I’m not sure I can destroy him.”
    “Leave that to me. You only need to get what you came for.” She withdrew a small, glass, corked vial and a slender Y-shaped metal pipe from inside her cloak. The end of the short arm of the Y was sharpened to a point. She took out the reed from Marduk’s arm and showed me how to insert the sharpened pipe into his vein. “Physicians use this for bloodletting,” she told me as drops of blood spilled from the pipe into the glass vial. I kept my eye on the vial to help keep it steady in my hand. When it was full, Madame La Pieuvre removed the pipe and corked the vial. Then I looked up and found Madame La Pieuvre staring into the monster’s open eyes.
    “Go!” she hissed, giving me the vial. “He’s not fully awake yet. As long as I maintain eye contact, he won’t be able to move.”
    “But—”
    “Just go. I’ll take care of him. It’s almost dusk. Go to the tower. If you follow this passage further, you’ll come to the courtyard. Climb to the top and wait there for Will. After I’ve taken care of Marduk, I’ll keep Dee and Ruggieri away.”
    I tried to think of an argument against this plan. I started to ask why she didn’t just kill Marduk now and come with me, but then I realized she didn’t want me to see her tearing apart a creature who looked so much like the man I loved. I didn’t want to see that either. So I followed her advice. I ran.

35
    The Timepiece
    And promptly got lost. The palace seemed to have been built like a maze, constructed according to some Machiavellian architect’s scheme to confuse one’s enemy. I ran through deserted salons occupied only by faded nymphs and fauns who looked embarrassed to be caught cavorting on their painted ceilings. The few remaining pieces of furniture were shrouded in ghostly canvas drop cloths. I nearly had a heart attack rounding a corner and coming face-to-face with a crocodile’s open jaws, but saw that it was only a stuffed specimen.
    Past the crocodile’s tail I spied the courtyard through a large, grimy window. I couldn’t get the window open, but a marble urn sitting beside the stuffed crocodile broke it just fine. I squeezed through, only cutting my hand a little on the broken glass.
    The courtyard was full of debris—broken furniture, shredded drapes, three more stuffed crocodiles in varying stages of decay … what was the fascination with crocodiles? I wondered as I picked my way across the littered ground. Whatever the reason for Catherine de Médicis’s fondness for the beasts, I didn’t have time to think about it now. Storm clouds still covered much of the sky, but in the west the sun had sunk beneath the clouds and hovered at the edge of the courtyard wall. It lit up the tower so that it seemed to glow against the inky clouds in the east. When I reached the low, arched door at its base, I experienced a moment of vertigo, recalling going through this same door only a few nights ago with Roger Elden. As I touched the handle, I could almost imagine that I was back in twenty-first-century Paris and that if I turned around, I’d find the metro stop. At the thought the watch pendant grew heavy and cold against my chest. I could be back, I realized, if I focused hard enough on the future, but